by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS:
Akron’s Tuesday Musical Association has announced that tickets will go on sale tomorrow, Thursday, July 1, for the Chanticleer concert in E.J. Thomas Hall on July 27 at 7:30 pm, rescheduled from last season due to the pandemic. The celebrated 12-voice male chorus from San Francisco will present “Awakenings,” with music by Monteverdi, Byrd, Vicente Lusitano, Villa-Lobos, Augusta Read Thomas, Ulysses Kay, Steven Sametz, Burton Lane, and a newly commissioned work by Ayanna Woods. Click here.
Chagrin Arts will present the Callisto Quartet — Paul Aguilar and Rachel Stenzel, violins, Eva Kennedy, viola, and Hannah Moses, cello — in a free, outdoor performance on Friday, July 16 at 7:00 pm in Solon Bicentennial Park. Formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2016, the ensemble won the 2018 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and took Second Prize at the 2019 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Currently serving as the Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the Shepherd School of Music at Houston’s Rice University, the Callisto have been appointed Fellowship Quartet in Residence at the Yale School of Music. Their concert on July 16 will include Haydn’s Quartet Op. 20, No. 1 & Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59, No. 3. Details here.
ON THE AIR AND ONLINE:
Tonight at 8:00 pm WCLV’s Ovations will revisit CityMusic Cleveland’s February and March chamber music programs and feature Denise Ondishko’s Cloudshifts for string quartet, Rebecca Clarke’s Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale for clarinet and viola, Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio in E-flat, K. 498, Amy Beach’s Quartet for Strings (In One Movement), Elena Ruehr’s String Quartet No. 3, and Jessie Montgomery’s Strum for string quartet.
And from Chicago, Eighth Blackbird will perform works by Ayanna Woods, whose music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, and the wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. This program features two pieces from her work-in-progress: a collection of short open-instrumentation pieces whose scores fit on 3×5 cards.
Details in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
The storks — or the maternity wards — weren’t very busy on June 30 in music history, but they did deliver one of our era’s most celebrated composer-conductors. Esa Pekka Salonen was born on this date in 1958 in Helsinki, Finland. Originally a horn player who anticipated a career as a composer and took up conducting merely to ensure that his music would be performed, Salonen was suddenly thrust onto the podium in 1983 to replace an ailing Michael Tilson Thomas in Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra. His career later took him — with various side excursions — to the directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and most recently, of the San Francisco Symphony. San Francisco Classical Voice previewed the plans for his first season there in yesterday’s edition.
Salonen’s birthday is a good occasion to consider why Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million people, has produced so many classical musicians. A list of prominent conductors alone includes Paavo Berglund, Mikko Franck, Klaus Mäkelä, Susanna Mälkki, Oli Mustonen, Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, John Storgårds, and Osmo Vänskä.
An article in France Musique attributes that outcome to Finland’s unique educational system, while an article in Gramophone suggests that the secret of Finnish conductors’ success on the podium lies in the fact that most of them mastered instruments and played chamber music before taking up the baton. John Storgårds referred to a recent summer chamber music festival whose organizers booked only Finnish conductors. They rehearsed every day for a week.
We had Osmo [Vänskä] there playing clarinet, Jukka-Pekka Saraste on violin, Okko [Kamu] on violin, myself [Storgårds] on violin, Susanna Mälkki played cello, Hannu Lintu played cello, Sakari Oramo played viola, Pietari Inkinen was on violin and then we had Leif [Segerstam] on the piano.
So that’s a chamber ensemble made up of, respectively, the chief conductors of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras (plus BBC Symphony Orchestra chief-designate), the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and, for good measure, the Helsinki Philharmonic’s conductor laureate (who also doubles as the Sibelius Institute’s professor of conducting). Not a bad line up.
To mark Salonen’s birthday, watch a video of his remarks on the 100th anniversary of Finland, hear Jennifer Koh play his solo violin piece, Lachen Verlernt, and watch a performance of his Cello Concerto featuring Truls Mørk, with Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
And hear Salonen reflecting on his debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra in September, 1983.
